Order Flow Tracks of Progress

There are various tracks of progress that you need to be succeed at and be progressing at a solid pace. To be a successful, profitable order flow trader and reach the highest point on the trading profit ladder you should be able to master every single track of progress.

Knowledge Accumulation

The first step is usually knowledge accumulation. You hear or read about trading or forex from someone or somewhere and you start researching the subject to see what it is all about. Eventually you usually stumble upon the charts, and technical analysis. Your first charts that you see usually are loaded up with some moving averages or technical indicators. That is one of the reason why new traders fail.

Every trader needs to accumulate some sort of knowledge. They want access to resources, books, videos, some blueprints to figure out how to succeed.

When I started out, I bought a few trading books, usually related to technical analysis and chart patterns. I browsed the trading forums heavily digging deeply into the posts about chart patterns, technical indicators, forex robots. Spend hundreds if not thousands of hours over two years stuck in those trading cycles. I would read the technical analysis articles of various forex websites.

Eventually I was able to develop my own feel for the market and view it through the principles of order flow, liquidity, news, global macro, etc.

Knowledge accumulation is extremely important. You need to have a certain knowledge base of resources that you can tap into to review material, see how other people handled various scenarios, generate new ideas, etc.

You have all this knowledge available to you, but you realize you need to sort it out. You realize that you may have to go through a bit or a lot of information overload. You want to start making sense of the information.

However, in order to do that you need to have, or develop and nurture your own desire and ambition. Your own desire and ambition so you can get to reading all the books, some of them multiple times. So you can read the blog posts, so you can perform the order flow exercises.

Some people realize that they have struck a gold mine of information, but don’t have the desire and ambition to figure all of it out and figure out how it can apply to them and their trading. Some of them even decide to go back to their old ways of chart patterns and technical analysis and spending countless hours on the forums. For those things they do find time and desire for.

Remember that trading success every single day generally requires a base level of enthusiasm.

Skill Development

Once you have the knowledge base and desire you can move into skill development. While you work your way through the knowledge base you create a list of daily habits that you will go through. A daily list of market and order flow exercises that you should do every day.

Everyone has habits. The chartist that sits at the end of every day spending one hour to review the daily charts has habits. They just have chartist and technical analysis habits.

The order flow trader has their own set of habits which can differ drastically from person to person. However, the common theme between them all is that they all operate under the order flow mindset. The order flow trader is always thinking about the order flow, the liquidity, and what will compel other traders to execute orders into the marketplace.

As you perform the daily habits and order flow exercises, you start to develop skills. Very valuable skills in some cases. You start to see the trading setups and actually placing some of them live in your account.

Implementation/Action/Execution

Once you have the knowledge base, you have the desire, and have acquired the skills, then the final step and the most important is the implementation. You need to take action and execute your new order flow skills within the marketplace. You get serious about finding the opportunities whenever they present themselves whether on an end of day basis, or an intraday basis. You find the opportunities and place the live trades.

There are some traders that get to the skill development stage, but never progress to the implementation stage. It is such a shame. They have developed all sorts of wonderful order flow skills but never deploy their new market skills to extract glorious profits from the market.

There are other traders that have developed the skills, but choose not to implement or take a lot of action. Some of them have already made their riches from trading and choose to just take it easy and be lazy about trading. They may place a few trades here and there and spread out their trades throughout the year. They want a more laid back approach to trading. They take action, just in a more lazy way.

The beginning and aspiring order flow trader however, needs to take massive, continued, and focused action. That is the only way to complete the order flow transformation.